When I was a child in Whetstone, London, I went to Sunday School at St John the Apostle Church of England where I began to learn the Christian scriptures through listening and acting. By the time I was a teenager I spent two years of Sunday afternoons with the Anglican Scripture Union Crusader Bible class which read the Hebrew prophets. Once I attempted to pray but it was for presents rather than love. This was a consequence of being spoilt at birthdays and Christmas by my adopted family.
Towards the end of 1974 when I was at the University of Manchester I bought a Buddhist book and learnt from it how to visualize a candle flame and the meaning of meditation and contemplation. This began my quest for serene peace. In the spring of 1975 I was sitting cross-legged in one of the woods at Hampstead Heath in North London, when my prajna (mystical wisdom breath) descended from the heavens by INFINITY.
In that summer I began sitting in physical stillness and mental silence by myself. I was not following anyone as there was just an overwhelming desire for a contemplative experience.Later in the year I passed through a Tibetan buddhist retreat centre near Dumfries before heading to Edinburgh to learn Soto Zen meditation from a Buddhist nun based at Throssel Hole Abbey near Hexham in the North Pennines. Zazen meant facing a wall whilst concentrating on my breathing from my lower abdomen as the founder Bodhidharma had done 1500 years or so ago in a Chinese mountain cave.
I joined the lay sangha in Newcastle as this enabled me to join a weekly zazen ceremony and also visit the Abbey for weekend retreats. My time in the Zendo or meditation hall really gave me the determination for a religious lifestyle. In 1976 I moved back to London and continued weekend retreats in Lewisham with a married monk and nun. When 1978 came to a close I had joined this couple, Mike and Karen, at Dharma House Trust near Penzance in Cornwall. This was a year-long retreat for me rather than a university education it prompted my passion for a solitary vocation. One of the other retreatants, Charlie, became a Zen master with his own temple in the Californian mountains.
In 1983 I stopped zazen and INFINITY withdrew me until 1989 when my encounter with a psychotherapist returned me to the spiritually religious practice. She did this because She wanted me to know about human suffering so it was to my advantage eventually. Up to 1996 my zazen began to become duller until ELOI brought me to Christian prayer and the bread and wine. Also He brought me to Islam as ALLAH around 1997 with an Arabian girlfriend and for about six months I prostrated in prayer once a day at the Regents Park Mosque. Although I was confirmed in an Anglican Church I viewed the Eucharist as similar to the Roman Catholic Mass and participated equally as an eclectic contemplative man. My method of Sunni prayer was to worship Allah by repeating ALLAH and visualising ALLAH in Arabic in my mind's eye. Around 2011 I began Sufi prayerful worship which is to repeat the 99 Names of ALLAH written in the Koran, known as the Dhikr. It begins with The Merciful, The Compassionate
I developed a strong interior prayer life for myself and in 2001 my almost daily attendance at the Anglican Edgware Abbey for nuns was balanced by occasional visits to the Roman Catholic Benedictine monastery at Cockfosters. However due to my study of the Eastern Orthodox Greek monks at the ascetic Mount Athos I tried to imitate their asceticism by giving up money whilst living in my own semi-detached house in a suburb. A neuro chemist friend helped me by shocking me out of my sanctuary with an image of a dinosaur centipede and by autumn 2004 I was back to my normal life as an eclectic religious man.
Although I live a life of serene peace I have a conviction of self-defence. In spring 2005 I started a 13-year retreat as it turned out to be in 2018. Both 2002 and 2003 plus 2008 were years of sexual purity so that by January 2018 I began using the Christian sacrament of aromatic myrrh oil to bathe in. Combining this with a previous burning of frankincense for sanctity, I found that the myrrh bathwash promoted sexual purity indeed as well as purifying all my skin preventing it from being dirty almost.
As I began my lengthy retreat I was about to kneel in Christian prayer one morning when ELOI asked me to worship Him. So I did worship Him for four hours every day until summer 2006 when He was satisfied with my devotion. After this Adoring Worship I turned my attention to the Christian-Buddhist visualisation of the Calvary cross and a Buddhist lotus position superimposed on each other. The images kept on changing for weeks until my one-pointed concentration fixed the final dual image in my mind's eye. Over the following months my visualisation strengthened so that by summer 2007 I could hold the dual image from waking in the morning to bedtime at night. I received a great healing and the beginning of my intuitive insight.
One day in August that year I was walking up Hayward Road N20 to the supermarket, whilst contemplating incarnation, when our Incarnator Goddess broke into my brainy head-mind (as distinct from my bodily life-force) and thoroughly convinced me She was our Almighty Mother. This was such a relieving pleasure as my koan of incarnation had been solved. Whereas ELOI in 2005 had made me consciously aware of my heartbeat, INFINITY in 2007 had made me consciously aware of my brain pulse. These two sensational feelings of deep contemplation were to bring me much heavenly pleasure and ecstatic blisses in the following years. At the conception of a human being with sperm and ovum there is also a life-force-heart-mind added, to enliven this new creation or incarnation, by our Creator God and/or our Incarnator Goddess as a tiny part of Him or Her. This life-force-heart-mind leaves the corpse at death with all his/her experiences to enter the ethereal world before passing into a heaven or paradise.
Before I downsized my home to a garden flat in Woodside Park N12 my eclectic self took on Jewish Adoring Worship and Sanatan Dharma meditation. As a Jew I began the Kabbalah without any instruction because I already had a developed Jewish soul. This involves repeating His 72 Names and Titles as they appear in the Hebrew bible. However I used Adonai, YAHWEH, Eh-yeh Asher Eh-yeh, El Shaddai, ELOHIM and YEHOVAH.
However I made a mistake with my Sanatan Dharma because I repeated the names of godly avatars rather than BRAHMAN/ISHVARA and SHAKTI/INFINITY as the divine mantras. The amount of time I spent in my sanctuary now was about six to eight hours a day. Using a computer I accessed the Zoroastrian and Jain religions. I had known a Parsee man in 1988/89 who was a working colleague, Kobad, and he introduced me to another Parsee, a solar scientist named Azam. In the Jewish religious faith YAHWEH is the correct name for the eternal creator compared to YEHOVAH who is the manifested anthropomorphic creator. YAHWEH is never spoken due to His sacredness. YAHWEH is the eternal mystical fire creator. A scientist-rabbi has given the following meaning as reported by a christian contemplative.When a child is born and takes his/her first breath the inhalation and exhalation sound like YAH-WEH. Similarly when someone dies his/her final breath of inhaling and exhaling sound like YAH-WEH. During speech it is normal to say Adonai when referring to Him.
I attended a Jain temple in Colindale a couple of times on Sunday mornings, yet again I mistakenly worshipped the fertility goddess rather than INFINITY. I have remedied that now. The Sikh religious faith came to me from a supermarket checkout lady whom I recognized as a Sikh so she gave me some literature about Sikhs when I asked for her help. Nowadays one of my cab drivers is a Sikh and we talk about this. By this time I had stopped church-going because in 2008 my christblood rose from my bodily life-force up into my brainy head-mind and this was the truest redemption.
Around 2012 my contemplative worshipping led me to all-night vigils and these have continued and last anywhere between 30 and 70 hours awake. One of my local shopkeepers, Ilhan, is a follower of Prophet Ali, ALLAH'S founder of the Islamic Shia tradition and his devotion is faithful which is what ALLAH demands and expects of Muslims.
With a prompt from Guru Nanak of the Sikhs I can write clearly that the reason for perfect marital loyalty is that this will produce a spiritual union between husband and wife created by Him or incarnated by Her. This will produce an immortal bonding of their hearts if they so desire it. Now I must end with the beginnings of the five human root races - Caucasian and Middle Eastern, African, Asian, Oriental and Native American Indian. The first is biblical and koranic. Moreover there were several originating heterosexual couples in the Garden of Eden otherwise humanity would have been incestuous.
The second happened when Almighty Father struck a big tree open with a fiery bolt of lightning and out stepped the first African man and woman onto the earthy grass. The third is celebrated in India every twelve years or so Kumbh Mela where the first Asian man and woman walked out of the River Ganges, onto dry land. The fourth occurred when there was a hurricane in the Orient and the first Oriental man and woman were thrown out of it by Him onto the land. The fifth beginning was shown to me by my heavenly wife Seraph America when four pairs of married angels descended to Central America to become temporarily human and start the Native American Indian root-race.
- Blessings